57 STUX + Haller Gallery

An extraordinarily well-versed (and well-dressed) young man enters from stage right and approaches the lectern with several slides, a carousel, and a pointer. He taps one of his platform heels impatiently as he waits for the houselights to dim and his voice to rise above the impending darkness in order to say, “Consider the term ‘love’ (with a proper stranger?) as a condition which breeds pathological self-knowledge or self-interest. Like fungus or bile, it interweaves, interlocks, whatever, within someone else’s pathology. This is just one more construct unworthy of our holy soul; we are compelled to replace it with sickness in the brain and with hate, which is our love.

“In knowing this, the dandy denied himself, and hence others, so commonplace an experience as that hate which is our love. He opted for the condition best described as failure of the imagination—irony, disbelief, and